photo by Djloche
I’ve spent a past life or two kicking against the pricks of growth. Things have since improved about 1,000% because I’ve come to terms with my habit of . . .
Eating New Contexts for Breakfast
My soul is rooted in a homeland, but I eat new contexts for breakfast. There’s a city where I’ll lay deep roots, but I still chew up/spit out new learning environments; I down them like rolls of Smarties(TM).
It’s not that I’m a badass, I just like kicking it Henry Thoreau style:
I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…to put to rout all that was not life; and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
-Henry David Thoreau
Put me in a new job, in a new learning environment, or a new situation and I’ll start drenching myself in that context. If I’m in a new city, I’ll go skinny-dipping in its rivers and lakes, visit its grimy underbelly, walk the streets of its neighborhoods, drink its tap water, and go to every possible block party. If it’s a new job, I’ll often try to meet everyone in the company, go to all the trainings, take on new projects, move up the ladder. I’m not alone in this, and chances are that at one time or another, you’ve “been there, done that.”
We all know the drill: You drench yourself in a situation, you wallow in the mud of humanity, wipe the grime all over yourself. You breathe it in, you live it, you grow from it. And then one day, like that, you wake up and discover its time to move on.
It’s not that you’ve grown out of a given situation, or grown above it or beyond it. It’s often that grown away from it. And this growing away is often painful because . . .
Our Culture Has a Delusional Obsession with Permanence
After we’ve graduated from college we’re allowed a couple years of experimental wiggle room. And when those years are oven we’re supposed to semi-permanently stay put. We’re supposed to stop vagabonding through life. We’re supposed to sit down and shut up. In this day and age, staying put in one’s situation (i.e. one’s career, job, company, city, town, etc.) is how you become an expert, advance in your field, and win the respect of your peers and family. We’re fed the myth that staying put affords us dream jobs. And we want this permanence as well: we want tenure, we want seniority, we want bedrocks and sure things.
The problem is that post-higher-education life just isn’t configured to encourage growth; it’s configured to reward stagnation. We’re rewarded for stagnating, for unnecessarily sticking with things.
Staying put WORKS and gets you respect. Being a dilittante does not get you respect, even though . . .
It’s The Dilettantes who Really Get to Grow
Radical and rapidfire growth often happens when you have freedom to try new things. Rapidfire growth doesn’t require traveling across the country, starting a new business, or flooding your senses on a daily basis, but it often requires a high level of latitude. Radical growth often requires the ability to rapidly change directions, change contexts, and change situations. Rapidfire growth often requires a dilettante-esque mobility. And if you exercise this mobility enough, other may very well perceive you as someone who hasn’t “found himself.”
But if you’re like me . . .
The Problem Isn’t that You Haven’t Found Yourself
If you’re like me, the problem isn’t that you haven’t found yourself, it’s you have. You’ve found yourself, and the self that you’ve found isn’t ready to settle for a life of stagnation. You want to continually get your hands dirty with this strange business of living. You want to go places, see new things, experience the sometimes ambiguous complexities of life. And as far as you can tell, you’ll never stop wanting these things.
The problem, of course, is . . .
The Price of Non-Stagnation
Following your own growth down the rabbit hole isn’t easy (and sometimes it’s not even worth it, but I’ll talk about that later):
- What happens when you outgrow an old job and have no clue what’s next because you can barely keep your head above water with work?
- When happens when you love your spouse but know that irreparable growth (a positive thing) has pulled you apart?
- What happens when you’re half-way into a Ph.D. program and know the degree isn’t right for you?
- What happens when your growth path requires you to ostensibly change course every week or so?
I don’t know what’ll happen. And neither do you. And that’s some scary stuff.
See, most people view growth as good, but . . .
Sometimes Good Medicine Tastes Really Bad
When I usually think of growth, I think of making more money, following my goals, and growing relationships. But sometimes. . .
- Growth can mean the end of marriages and relationships
- Growth can mean making far less money
- Growth can lead to existential crises, questioning everything, and depression
- Growth can make you come across as a quitter and a flake
- Growth can wrench your self esteem
- Growth can push your friends away and lead to (temporary) alienation
And often . . .
- The price of growth could be your goals (yup!)
- The price of growth could be relationships, friendships
In short, growth can f*ck you up because . . .
Growth has Both Velocity and Direction
All growth propels the grower in some direction, even if the destination (if there is one) is far from clear. But since we can’t be everywhere all of the time, growth can propel us away from things for which society rewards us. Radical growth can propel us away from things we once loved and cherished. And because of this . . .
The Price of Radical Growth is Sometimes NOT Worth It
I’ll probably get some flack for saying this, but I’ll say it anyway: most marriages, most relationships will have a difficult time surviving radical personal growth and evolution. Relationships can become dependent on hundreds of implicit agreements, patterns, rituals, and shared views of reality and it often puts an unendurable stress on a relationship when these agreements, patterns, etc. are relentlessly challenged, ignored, or changed. Good relationships can survive depression, and terrorism, and prison sentences, and all kinds of horrible things, but radical growth is a difficult (but not impossible) to survive. It’s a tuffy.
I’d like to sugarcoat things and say you’ll never have to chose between your marriage and radical growth, or your children and radical growth, but that’s just not the case. The are priorities that I will always put before such growth because sometimes rapid growth just isn’t worth it. Sometimes its better to opt for deferred compensation.
In closing, I’d like to add some . . .
Additional Wisdom from Kelly Rigby and Melissa Pierce
Kelly and Melissa said things in the comments that needed to by said, and I’d like to make their words more visible. I don’t know exactly where this article got off track, but my gut tells me that their words set things straight. Here’s what Kelly had to say about this article:
[W]hen I got married, and definitely when I had my son, I saw that a truly happy life, a connected life, one that matters and has value both to yourself and others, is not just about my personal growth and what I need. Other people have needs too and if I love and respect them enough to want to keep them in my life, then I must consider their needs just as much as my own.
You can stay a perpetual self-seeking nomad forever if you want to, but I have chosen not to. The costs would be too high. So I find innovative and adjustable ways to keep the free spirit alive and well. It is possible, it just takes a lot more effort.
-Kelly Rigby from She-Power.com
Here are Melissa’s insights:
Our society puts way to much pressure on us to “go it alone”?, and that friggin’ loner hero cowboy [stuff] is really getting old. OK, stepping down from the soapbox.
Sometimes, yeah – when we grow relationships and entire modalities of living are lying by the wayside… I’ve got a very personal relationship with outgrowing my surroundings, leaving them behind, setting them up on fire, running away and starting again. But sometimes, your relationships and modalities grow with you – And that my friends is the sweetest most surreal radical growth ever. Maybe I’m out of line for saying this too, but I think this is more of a maturity and respect issue – if you do fucking know who you are, and what you want, then respecting yourself and others enough to be forthcoming with the direction in which your heading and why is “half the battle”? (knowing is half the battle – GI Joe)
-Melissa Pierce
There were “wisdom gaps” in this piece, just as there are wisdom gaps in your
s truly. Thanks to Kelly and Melissa for stopping by to both identify and fill some of these gaps.
Eat new contexts for breakfast by subscribing to The Growing Life.
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P.S. You have to see this.
P.P.S. Through this blog I’ve been fortunate enough to get to know some really good people. People who’ve helped me out without expecting anything in return. People who’ve given because that’s just how they live. People like JEMi, Kelly Rigby, MonkMojo, Joyce Shwarz, Jared Goralnick, Tom Stine, Jonathan Nasman, Naomi Dunford, Stephen Smith, and Charlie Gilkey, and several others whose names have slipped my mind at 2:00am (please forgive me).
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